Minneapolis, MN (RestaurantNews.com) The Board of Directors of Carlson, a global hospitality and travel company, has authorized a review of strategic alternatives available to the Company, including a possible sale of TGI FridaysTM Restaurants. As part of the evaluation process, the board of directors has selected Piper Jaffray to serve as its financial advisor.

Trudy Rautio, president and chief executive officer of Carlson, said “Capitalizing on Fridays’ strong marketplace momentum, the board has determined that this is the optimum time to assess its options for the iconic restaurant brand, including a possible sale.”

During this process, Fridays will continue to operate its business as usual, executing on the strategy and plans already in place that are delivering above-market performance across the U.S., U.K. and other international markets.

Garden burgers. Power bars. Protein brownies. Bottled water that makes you thin, young and smart. And we used to wonder what they put in Pop Rocks...

These days it's hard for even die-hard foodies to know what they're eating or drinking. That's because food has changed from something that didn't need a modifier -- if it walked, swam, flew or grew out of the ground, it was food -- to something that stopped off at Mr. Burns' nuclear plant on the way to your plate.

Let's call it "foodiness." Like Stephen Colbert's truthiness, which wasn't about truth, we're not consuming food as much as we're consuming an edible manufactured doppelganger designed to look and taste like food, but isn't actually food: like veggie puffs with no vegetables; fruit bars with no fruit; like goldfish crackers with no goldfish.

And now, below, a look at some typical foodiness ingredients that are packaged, flavored and presented …

The past weeks have seen a surprising meeting of minds between chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, the Bank of England, the Olympic-rowing and Zuckerberg-bothering Winklevoss twins, and the US Department of Homeland Security. The connection? All have decided it's time to take Bitcoin seriously.

Until now, what pundits called in a rolling-eye fashion "the new peer-to-peer cryptocurrency" had been seen just as a digital form of gold, with all the associated speculation, stake-claiming and even "mining"; perfect for the digital wild west of the internet, but no use for real transactions.

Bitcoins are mined by computers solving fiendishly hard mathematical problems. The "coin" doesn't exist physically: it is a virtual currency that exists only as a computer file. No one computer controls the currency. A network keeps track of all transactions made using B…

"McKinsey's dramatic global power shift. Conventional wisdom, but is it still true?" he tweeted.

Here's the map, which researchers found by taking each country's geographic center and weighting its distance from the center of the earth by GDP. And when they added in 2025 GDP projections, it looks like we're heading back to where we started.

Of course, the big story this year is the slowdown in emerging markets while developed markets begin to recover. And we can expect this tension to be a major theme economists look at in the coming years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.

The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown.

For four decades now, fresh fruit consumption in Japan has experienced a marked decline. Household cosumption has dropped to less than half of its levels in the 1970s and fruit has lost much of its appeal with younger generations.

Japanese consumers in their 20s and 30s eat only 70% of the level of fruit eaten by those over 60, according to the United States Deparment of Agriculture (USDA).

To encourage higher consumption, the U.S. Agricultural Trade Office (ATO) in Japan has launched the “Enjoy Fruits!” campaign, an initiative directed at raising awareness of U.S. agricultural products.

The guidebook aims to turn around Japan’s growing disfavor for fruit by demonstrating the health aspect of the category. Its core concept, “Future Fruits,” demonstrates new opportunities to incorporate fruit through art, sports, music, and other cultural events.

The beginning of the campaign has focused on Japan’s food industry through trade shows and events, as well as strategic meet…